Piranesi's Lost Words

Hardcover | October 8, 2015

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about

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the most important artists eighteenth-century Europe produced. But Piranesi was more than an artist; he was an engraver and printmaker, architect, antiquities dealer, archaeologist, draftsman, publisher, bookseller, and author. In Piranesi’s Lost Words, Heather Hyde Minor considers Piranesi the author and publisher, focusing on his major publications from 1756 to his death in 1778. Piranesi designed and manufactured twelve beautiful, large-format books combining visual and verbal content over the course of his lifetime. While the images from these books have been widely studied, they are usually considered in isolation from the texts in which they originally appeared. This study reunites Piranesi’s texts and images, interpreting them in conjunction as composite art. Minor shows how this composite art demonstrates Piranesi’s gift for interpreting the classical world and its remains—and how his books offer a critique of both the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past and how eighteenth-century scholars explicated this past. Piranesi’s books, Minor argues, were integral to the emergence of the modern discipline of art history. Using new, previously unpublished archival material, Piranesi’s Lost Words refines our understanding of Piranesi’s works and the eighteenth-century context in which they were created.

About The Author

Heather Hyde Minor is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome (Penn State, 2010). Heather Hyde Minor is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment ...

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Extra Content

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Reading Piranesi in the Twenty-First Century

2. Reading Piranesi in the Eighteenth Century

3. How Piranesi Made a Book Out of Fragments of Ancient Texts and Buildings

4. How Piranesi Made a Book Out of Fragments of Modern Texts and Images

5. How Piranesi Made a Book That Questions It All

6. How Piranesi’s Words Got Lost

7. How Piranesi’s Words Got Found

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Compelling and beautifully written. . . . Thanks to Minor’s stimulating publication, Piranesi’s fame as an author is restored, albeit in terms of a highly complex kind of authorship, the peculiarities of which we can be grateful to her for articulating.”